Two sources tell The Associated Press that small businesses will not be able to enroll online starting Oct. 1 when new health insurance markets go live. Instead, one of the sources, a person who was briefed on the situation, said business owners will initially have to mail or fax their information so that they can enroll.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement hasn’t yet been made.

Now, don’t think of this as being “evidence that the people setting up the exchanges have been skylarking and malingering on the public dime for three and a half years and are just now discovering that all those deadlines are suddenly looming and there are going to be a lot of angry forced customers pretty soon and that the scapegoats have already been picked out by the Obama administration and guess what? The scapegoats aren’t going to be drawn from the executive branch of the government.” That’s just silly. No, think of it as being “retro.”

Retro is “hep,” right? No, wrong word… “fly?” “Phat?” “Hawt?” These young kids, and their slang… what? Hey, I never claimed to be cool. I’ve also never connived to throw the entire weight of an incompetently designed and stupidly developed monstrosity of a health care rationing system on the backs of the young, so I figure that I’m still ahead on points.

I work in various government online systems daily. This is par for the course. They spend $10’s of millions on systems that are supposed to perform very basic tasks. When they roll them out those systems break and they can’t fix them so they go back to just e-mailing excel spreadsheets and pdf’s. They also get obsessive about getting documents with wet signatures so you have to snail mail forms.